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TOKYO — Burial options in Japan are expanding beyond the traditional Buddhist ceremony. You can
now send a loved one’s ashes into space.

Elysium Space Inc. is offering a service in Japan to send a portion of a person’s cremated
remains in a capsule that will circle the Earth for several months for $1,990. Relatives and
friends can track the spacecraft’s trajectory on a mobile phone app. Like a meteorite, the remains
eventually disintegrate upon entering the Earth’s atmosphere, “blazing as a shooting star,” the
company said.

About one gram of a person’s remains are placed into an individual “space-grade” aluminum
capsule, Benjamin Joffe, a spokesman for the company, said in an email. Missions will carry between
100 to 400 individual capsules, he said.

The Japanese are looking to reduce the size and expense of funerals as relatives become fewer
and traditional ties weaken in one of the world’s fastest-aging societies. The cost of renting a
burial plot and buying a tombstone in Tokyo is about 2.7 million yen ($27,400), according to the
Japan Institute of Life Insurance.

Elysium Space began taking space-burial reservations in the U.S. in August.The San Francisco
company’s first launch is scheduled for next summer.